Not your father’s summer school

DALLAS TWP. – Camp tents and card games and toy horses that whinny? These kids may be in rooms full of desks and it may be June, but isn’t there some kind of law that says summer school can’t be fun?

“I love it,” veteran teacher Sharon Hartshorne exuded when asked about the summer school reading program at Dallas Elementary, “And I love it because during the school year I see students who don’t want to get involved or who show they are not interested, yet in the summer time they shine.”

Even a casual tour of the classrooms shows this is not the summer school the older generation may remember. Each day opens with a brief group assembly that more closely resembles a pep rally as teachers rev up the students for their three hours of learning. They gather in the school library, decorated with a large papier-mache camel and a child-style mural. Laughter and applause waft from the open door, and the children start streaming out with smiles on their faces and, sometimes, items in their hands – including, on a recent day, a stick pony that neighed as the boy made his way to more individualized instruction.

Some students will get one-on-one attention. This particular day, after the assembly, Hartshorne sat at a child-sized round table and helped a boy read individual words, syllable by syllable. When he struggled with the right sound for the “i” in “ride,” she asked “What does the ‘e’ do? He quickly remembered the change in sound for the “i.”

Other words help sand off the rust: “pollute,” “postpone,” “handshake.” Hartshorne routinely stops to ask what a word means, but also throws in a few “nonsense” words like “enthrube” that help put the focus on sounding out the syllables.

“We emphasize skills, but we always try to keep the big ideas of reading, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension and fluency,” she said. The goal isn’t necessarily to make specific gains in specific skills, though some of the sophisticated techniques do that. That occurs throughout the school year as teachers strive to meet specific benchmarks. For example, by the end of second grade, students are expected to read 90 words a minute. By the end of fifth, it’s 125.

Here the main goal is broader, Hartshorne said. “I think we spur an interest and get them to read more over the summer.”

Studies have shown that reading skills are among the most important that students can bring to elementary grades. If a student starts out lacking the needed abilities early, they tend to keep falling further behind. Which is one reason summer reading school here includes kindergarten students. They tend to focus on “letters and sounds,” Hartshorne said, as two teachers worked with the noisiest – and probably most energetic – group in the building.

Asked what they liked best about summer school – and really, who would have expected students to even take such a question seriously – the older children routinely smiled and volunteered answers enthusiastically.

“You can see your friends that you don’t see during summer,” one boy replied. “You can get out of the house,” a girl said. “Moving around and doing lots of stuff,” another boy added. “Learning” a third student blurted.

Actually, the learning goes far beyond just reading. When Hartshorne was working one-on-one and started a story titled “The Cactus Plant,” she asked her student if he knew what a cactus was, where they grow (“Texas!” he said triumphantly) and what he suspected the story would be about. “We work on comprehension, summary of the main idea, things like that,” Hartshorne said.

In the class with grades three and four, the teacher was reading a story with a Mexican flavor – and a few foreign words. “Yesterday was Spanish,” she said.

Older students had just read a book in which the lead character went camping and learned to play a variety of games. So what did the teachers do? Hold part of their classes in a camping tent – two actually, one outside for sunny days and one inside for rainy times. “Just like Survivor!,” one boy suggested.

They also let the kids learn and play the games, which included “Human Pretzel,” “Fing Fang Fooey” and “Spoons,” in which five players swapped cards in an effort to get four of a kind, which entitled them to grab one of four spoons on a table. The person left without a spoon lost.

“You might want to jump back when we grab the spoons,” one boy warned. He was not exaggerating. While the card swapping seemed sedate enough, they all waited until the last minute to pounce at the spoons at the same time, making them disappear in a clatter of silver.

This reading program is open to any student who is eligible for services under the federal Title I program, which targets low-income students who need a little extra help. It is voluntary - “Anyone who is eligible can come,” Hartshorne said – and fully funded by federal dollars. Math summer school for elementary students, on the other hand, is paid from district coffers, Business Manager Grant Palfey said. Hartshorne also noted the math classes are, by nature of the subject, more structured. Classes run three hours a day, four days a week for four weeks.

Summer school pay is typically an additional hourly pay on top of a teacher’s regular annual salary, and is set by the teacher contract on a sliding scale. The more continuous years experience as a teacher within the district, the higher the hourly rate. The current Dallas contract set that pay in the 2005-06 school year at $25 per hour to those with 0-5 years, $30 for those with 6-10, and $35 for 11 or more years. Those amounts have increased by 2.5 percent or 3.85 percent each year since then. With 32 years in the district, Hartshorne gets about $38 per hour this year. Summer school is also offered for high school students, but starts later, and the program is run by Luzerne County Community College, Dallas Superintendent Frank Galicki said.

At the elementary reading level, the teachers clearly go to considerable lengths to keep the students engaged. Along with camping, international studies, and learning games, some students wrote journals, and most participated in a bit of a stage show dubbed “Readers Theater.” An invitation sent home to parents included the promise that “we are certain a number of academy awards will follow this premiere event.”

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